Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate whether a “Jigsaw” technique can improve students’ reading comprehension skill. The jigsaw technique is a specific cooperative learning which gives the students the opportunity to interact meaningfully with reading material and the responsibility to share the ideas to other members of the class.
The design of this study was experimental design. The experimental group was given a treatment by using “Jigsaw” technique and the control group was treated without using “Jigsaw” technique. The population in this study was the first year students of SMPN 3 Pasuruan which consisted of four classes; labeled A up to D. The sampling technique was cluster sampling. The writer selected two classes consisted of 36 students. The instrument used to collect the data was a reading comprehension test. This instrument was tried out before it was administered to the experimental and control groups.
The data of this study were analyzed based on the Independent Samples t-test by employing SPSS 11. After the data had been analyzed, it was found that there was not any significant difference between the pretest means of the experimental and control groups. In other words, before the experiment, the means of two groups were equal. Then, based on the result of t-test, it was found that t-value was less than .05. Therefore, the null hypothesis which stated that the “Jigsaw” technique did not improve students’ reading comprehension skill was rejected. In other words, the research or alternative hypothesis which stated that the “Jigsaw” technique improved students’ reading comprehension skill was accepted. The t-value = 3,398 at the significance level of .001 which was less than .05 indicating that there was a significant difference between the means of the posttest scores of the experimental and control groups. It could be stated that the “Jigsaw” technique could improve students’ reading comprehension skill.
Based on the research findings, it can be concluded that the “Jigsaw” technique can improve students reading comprehension skill.